JAUME PLENSA (b. 1955, Barcelona, Spain) is a leading contemporary sculptor internationally renowned for his large-scale public installations. For more than forty years, the artist has created meditative sculptures, drawings, and environments that make manifest a sense of spirituality and an atmosphere of introspection. Working across materials as varied as stone, steel, glass, wood, light, water, video, language, and sound, Plensa’s practice invites viewers to ruminate on their fundamental relations to space, to silence, to beauty, and to a shared humanity.
Plensa’s first solo exhibition at GRAY was presented in the gallery’s Chicago location in 1996. Since then his practice has been the subject of more than a dozen monographic and group exhibitions at the gallery’s spaces in Chicago and New York. Plensa’s work has featured in major exhibitions such as the Venice Biennale in 2015 and 2024, and in permanent commissions like Water’s Soul along the Hudson River, Utopia at Frederik Meijer Gardens, and Crown Fountain in Chicago’s Millennium Park. Today, Plensa’s sculptures for public space can be viewed in cities across the world, including Singapore, Seoul, Dubai, Los Angeles, San Diego, Miami, Bangkok, Shanghai, Tokyo, London, and Nice.
Solo museum exhibitions of Plensa’s works have been presented at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Yorkshire, England; Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona, Spain; Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, Texas; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain; Musée Picasso, Antibes, France; Museu Oscar Niemeyer, Curitiba, Brazil; Museum Beelden aan Zee, The Hague, Netherlands; and at the Max Ernst Museum, Brühl, Germany, among many others.
The artist’s work is held in dozens of institutional collections around the world, and he has received numerous national and international awards, including honorary doctorates from Notre Dame University and the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, as well as the Velazquez Prize awarded by the Spanish Cultural Ministry. Plensa lives and works in Barcelona.
